Today’s Auditor-General’s report on Service Victoria highlights a litany of failures by the Andrews Labor Government in implementing an online transaction delivery platform.
Yet again, the Andrews Labor Government is happy to waste taxpayer money through its incompetence.
Key observations by the Auditor-General in relation to Service Victoria include:
- It has not realised its objective of reducing the costs of existing government transactions and improving compliance with regulation.
- Implementation was hampered by a poor business case and inadequate stakeholder and risk management, exacerbated by the lack of a strong mandate.
- It has fallen well short of its ambition to achieve whole-of-government digital transaction reform in its first five years.
While the Andrews Labor Government claimed Service Victoria would handle 11 million transactions and deliver cost savings of $61 million per annum, the Auditor-General found only 800,000 transactions were completed in 2019-20 generating savings of only $6 million.
The Auditor-General found that the cost of transactions delivery through Service Victoria was more than double that of face to face transactions, when Service Victoria’s budget was taken into account.
Comments attributable to Shadow Minister for Government Services, Gordon Rich-Phillips:
“Once again the Andrews Labor Government has botched a major ICT project, failing to learn the lessons of its many past failures.
“Only Labor could deliver a digital platform where online transactions cost twice as much as face to face transactions.
“Yet again this government has been caught wasting taxpayer money.”
